Getting Started With GTrends SE

In this post I’ll explain the basics of using the GTrends SE tool. I’m going to assume you’ve already installed it (if you’ve ever installed any software it should be easy enough) and you’ve set up my Firefox extension. The extension is optional, but I recommend you install it because makes using GTrends SE easier.

Okay, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to find a potentially profitable niche!

Think of a relatively broad niche or something that people would search for. “Sausage making”, “speed reading”, various “how to” topics and similar are a good start.

Go to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends/, type in your keyword(s) and hit Enter. For the sake of this tutorial I’ll use the search terms “how to resume” (without the quotes), as I already know they’re likely to return some good niches. This search phrase will return keywords that contain the words how, to and resume.

Wordtracker will show some related keywords along with estimated search volume.

Assuming you’ve set up the FF extension and the toolbar button, just click the button!

This will put the keywords in clipboard and launch GTrends SE. It will pop up and start processing the keywords. You can wait for it to finish, or go back to Wordtracker to research more niches and leave it running in the background. If you do another search and click the button again, the newfound keywords will be added to the list and checked, too.

Depending on you Internet connection speed, GTrends configuration and the number of keywords to check, the analysis can take a few minutes to complete.

Hey, look, there are some good niches here! Keywords that match the criteria for “good” niches are highlighted in green. Let’s do a quick overview of the columns here –

Keyword – self-explanatory.

Competition – the number of results returned when searching for “keyword phrase” (with quotes; phrase match) on Google. This is the approximate number of pages you’d be competing against if you tried to get your site to rank #1 for the keyword. The recommended value is no more than 30 000 results.

Searches – actually this is the estimated number of visitors/day you’d get from Google if your page would be in #1 position. Typically this will be roughly equal to the number of people searching for this phrase on Google. The recommended value is more than 100 searches/day.

Verdict – whether the keyword matches the configured criteria. Basically if it’s “Good”, you could get your website on the first page of Google results relatively easily, using the free TDC techniques. You can change the criteria by clicking the Settings button.

Web2.0 – this will say “Yes” if any of the most common Web 2.0 content sites were found on the first page of Google results (phrase match). This is generally undesirable, but a “Good” keyword is still worth a look even if there are some Web 2.0 sites optimized for it.

This is everything you need to know to start finding profitable niches faster than ever before (oh I’m sounding salesy, aren’t I 😉 ) The GTrends SE tool has many more features that I didn’t mention here, but that’s beyond the scope of this “Getting Started” guide. I’ll discuss them in another tutorial, some other day. For now, start reasearching and good luck!

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22 thoughts on “Getting Started With GTrends SE”

I have purchased this cool tool but am having some problems. I am hoping you can help so I can start using it. I have installed the FF extension and have the little icon on my toolbar. Whenever I click it I get this pop up… “The page structure was not recognized! Maybe this isn’t a Word Tracker results page?” Can you please help. Thanks in advance.

Note to anyone reading the comments – Darrel also contacted me via PM in a forum, so I decided to use private messages instead of blog comments to discuss the glitch (keeps the blog from becoming cluttered). After some bug-hunting I was able to find and fix the problem. Everything should be working correctly now.

– How are you fetching results and is it breatching Google TOS?
– Do you quary word at a time or you speed up the prcess by entering base and all other searches ater seperated by komma (so you have to parse only one or two queries..)
– Can you have a list of web2.0 sitesto match for in external file?

1) Any tool that fetches the data through “automated means” without Google’s explicit permission violates their TOS. Yes, this one does too.

2) One at a time. I thought about processing multiple keywords simultaneously, but that approach may severely decrease the accuracy. This is because Google Trends graphs would be scaled to show all keywords, and if you happen to have one keyword that has 10000 searches, while the rest have a few hundred only, the estimation becomes wildly innacurate.

If it’s 100 searches per minute, you will be temporarily banned, no doubt about that. On the other hand, if you set a larger timeout between searches, like 10 seconds (for example), you should be fine. These timeouts are called “grace periods” in GTrends SE and can be set in the “Settings” window.

You could also use a proxy to circumvent this problem, though this approach comes with it’s own problems (like finding a good proxy).

Theoretically, yes. There is no explicit limit to how many keywords you can have. In practice the number of keywords it is able to handle will be limited by your computer’s performance. Huge keyword lists can take a while to load and may slow down the application.

If it does slow down considerably, you can always split the huge list into several smaller lists and check them separately.

That column was created because one user suggested a feature like that might be useful.Read more here. BTW, you can safely ignore that number if you want, it’s not a part of Thirty Day Challenge teachings or anything.

Hi Awesome tool. Just a quick question..how are you estimating search traffic? Ed Dales baseline phrase “male yeast infection” just got removed from the results…are you using that phrase or some other appraoch to calculate your est searches…just trying to understand where the data is soruced so if things go belly up I know why.

“male yeast infection” already had some problems a few months ago, so I’m not using it anymore for this tool. It now comes with a different reference keyword by default (which works – tested today).

You can also set your own baseline, if you have one. I’d actually recommend doing this – if GTrends SE gets over a few thousand active users (hey, I can dream, right? 🙂 ), any “default” keyword would eventually be killed off by Google.